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An unprecedented effort to privatize Texas public schools is underway this legislative session, led by the so-called Texans for Education Reform and promoted by out-of-state billionaires' foundations, the Texas-based Laura and John Arnold Foundation and organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which pushes cookie-cutter legislation from state to state designed to benefit its corporate funders.

One of these privatization efforts, the so-called “parent trigger” legislation, claims to provide parental empowerment but, in fact, is designed to pave the way for private charter operators or private alternative managers to take over neighborhood schools.

Under legislation proposed in both the Texas House and Senate this session, private operators with no connection to the community would be able to hire a political consultant to collect parents' signatures on a “petition to improve your school.” But the real agenda would be to hand over control of the school to a charter operator. The beginning and end of parental empowerment under this parent trigger concept is the parent's signature on a petition for charter takeover. After that, the charter entity gains total control of the school. The locally elected school board and, by extension, the citizens, parents and taxpayers who elected the school board and paid to build the school cease to have a say in how the school is run.

Once in the hands of a charter operator, the children attending the school no longer have the benefit of important state quality safeguards, including class-size limits, teacher certification standards and fair standards of student conduct and discipline that protect the rights of all students. Ironically, once the parent trigger has been pulled, even parental rights under the state education code would go by the wayside as the public neighborhood school is converted through this process to a charter operation.

Why, you may be wondering, are parents supporting parent trigger legislation if it is, in reality, a trick? The answer is that parents are not supporting this privatization scheme. As has been the case in other states, such as Florida, which has twice rejected such a proposal after massive parental pushback, the PTA in Texas is not in favor of this legislation. Neither are the parents who have organized Save Texas Schools or the moms who started TAMSA (Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment) and who have succeeded in forcing legislative leaders to re-evaluate our state's broken testing and accountability system.

In contrast to the phony version of parental empowerment embodied in parent trigger, there is an authentic version already in the Texas Education Code — and it works. Under current law, a majority of parents and a majority of teachers at a campus, acting together, are empowered to petition their school board for an in-district campus charter, without having to forgo any of the educational quality standards and safeguards in the education code.

Real parental empowerment comes up from below and gives parents an ongoing voice in their children's public schools. The parent trigger model is being propagated by venture capitalists who seek to rapidly expand for-profit charter-school chains for their own benefit.

These same private interests and out-of-state organizations simultaneously are trying every other way they can — through vouchers, for-profit virtual schools and draconian takeover schemes that remove schools from the control of locally elected school boards — to privatize Texas public schools. The Legislature should reject proposed parent trigger bills and recommit our state to a system of well-funded neighborhood public schools — as required by our state constitution.